KOJONUP grower Stephen Marsh believes even more GM canola has found its way into his organically certified paddocks.
Mr Marsh was featured in last week’s Farm Weekly voicing his concern about the ineffectiveness of GM buffer-zones in the Great Southern when he found GM canola swathes had blown up against his boundary fence.
This week, he said, the situation turned dire as wind and sudden temperature changes caused five of Mr Marsh’s organic paddocks to become seriously contaminated by a neighbour’s swathed GM canola plants.
The contamination occurred up to one kilometre away from his boundary fence where the canola swathes appeared last week.
A strip of land one and a half kilometres wide over five paddocks had been contaminated and Mr Marsh’s sheep had started to eat the wayward seed pods.
Mr Marsh said the contamination had occurred over 180 hectares of his farm.
“It’s hard to know where to go from here,” he said.
“It’s gone beyond the issue of buffer-zones and it’s a real possibility that we could lose our livelihood and our organic certification.”
Of the five contaminated paddocks only one had been cropped but Mr Marsh still didn’t have the option to shift his stock.
“I can’t move my sheep because they’ve eaten it and I can’t risk spreading it further over the farm,” he said.
Investigations by the Agriculture and Food Department and the Australian and International Organic Certifier (NASAA) are currently underway and until the results are released it will continue to be a stressful waiting game for the Marsh family and all those involved.
Agriculture and Food Minister Terry Redman couldn’t comment on the situation until the results from tests carried out by Agriculture and Food Department officers were received.
The continuation of the GM debate in WA was this week underpinned by a western Victorian farmer who blamed genetic modification for the loss of his entire canola crop over recent weeks.
Quintin Wilmott said he had 100 tonnes of canola he couldn’t sell because the pods had split and the seed inside had started to sprout.
The seed company denied it was because of genetic modification as did the developer of the technology Monsanto.
The head of Monsanto Australia, Peter O’Keefe said the likely explanation for the seed growth was that the particular canola variety couldn’t handle the wet weather.
“It’s not GM-related,” he said.
“It’s very much to do with seasonal conditions as much as anything, maybe potentially a varietal interaction with that.
“That’s my understanding, it’s nothing to do with GM.
“We’ve had a lot of rain at the wrong time of the year and this particular field has shot and that’s to do with having a lot of rain at the wrong time of the year as much as anything.”
